While traveling in Singapore, we stayed at the whimsical Philippe Stark-designed South Beach Hotel. While everything about this hotel is a wild and crazy design experience, the piece that immediately impressed me was the large, high resolution digital video display that greets you in the front entrance. It stands about 20′ high by about 15′ wide and seems to be about 2mm or less in dot pitch – very high resolution by today’s standards. What is most impressive is the […]

On a recent visit to Dubai, we visited the new Apple Store concept. One thing of note is no more genius bar – it’s now among some indoor trees and called the “Genius Grove”. Most impressive was a large video display in the rear of the store – very high resolution (2 mm). The content was impeccable, a ‘simple’ loop of large product arrays – slowly animating to create an ambient motion ‘dance’ of Apple products. No text. No cuts. […]

Written by Philip Lenger, featured this month on Sparksheet – Good ideas about content, media and marketing. Digital out-of-home advertising can be the bane of shoppers’ existence or the shopping guide they never knew they needed. Show+Tell founder Philip Lenger shares his rules for a winning DOOH strategy. Read more on the Sparksheet Article link here.

Though very experimental, this technology by Aerial Burton looks to be very interesting. Combining infrared lasers and plasma emissions, bright pixels appear in midair. Watch the video. Gonna wait for the 4K version to come out before we buy one!

A recent post in Ad Week illustrates the power of Times Square advertising. The key takeaway here is that this may be the only place in advertising where the ads ARE the show. Click here for the original Ad Week posting.

This is encouraging to see. The dream we all have had – the ability to design screens without the rectangular boundaries – is becoming more of a reality every day. Sharp has announce a new Free-Form Display technology which allows for screens to be almost any shape. It’s still far from prime-time – won’t be useable in a practical application for a while, but the promise is there. From a display design standpoint, this is going to get fun. Stay […]

While I enjoy great 3D projection mapping on castles and skyscrapers, there’s something very cool about bringing the scale down and doing it on smaller shapes and forms. I love this concept that shows off these architectural models in very creative ways. Would be a fun museum installation. View the project here on the Projektil teams website.

I was fortunate enough to be a speaker at last weeks Billboards Unplugged event, part of DPBMedia Week and one of the Thought Leadership Summits put on by the fine folks at the DailyDOOH. I’ll be posting here with some of the individual thoughts, but for the record, here a link to my presentation slides and videos. Billboards Unplugged: Content Magic Presentation October 21, 2013 Barco Media Center, New York

The clever, clever folks over at Bot & Dolly have put together this demo of some of their super smart robots and theatrical technologies. You really have to see it to believe it. In Magic, there is always a little disappointment when you discover the secret of the method to an effect (this is why good magicians never tell!). In this case, it’s the opposite. Once you understand how this dance was done, it’s even more amazing.

The Wall Street Journal recently went shopping to see what it costs to ‘buy’ a sign in Times Square. What they found was that advertising on a Times Square sign is governed by real estate rules that preside everywhere else – location is key in the pricing hierarchy. Sign owners rent the space annually from the owners of buildings where the signs are physically attached.

Antonin Fourneau has developed a fun and beautiful installation that seems to mix electricity and water in a good way – for our viewing pleasure. Called Water Light Graffiti, the exhibit encourages visitors to douse the display with buckets of water, providing for lots of playful interactivity and wet sneakers. The LED water screen is only on view in NYC for one week before it heads back to France. I’m excited to see this kind of display being incorporated into […]

Jay Leno does a bit with hidden cameras and digital signage at a gas pump. In this clip, he finds the coolest couple willing to let loose and have some fun. (Hang around until the end.) Can we ever hope that real digital signage will get this interactive? Let’s hope!

The University of Illinois at Chicago is doing some very nice work with a visualization lab called Cave2. It is capable of 320 degrees of 2D or 3D imagery at stunningly high resolutions. They’ll be using it for medical, architectural and physics models and research. Looks like a very useful tool and great fun.

We consider ourselves part of an industry which is sometimes referred to as Environmental Design. This community is a very broad group which includes Architects, and other designers of the Retail, Interior, Graphic, Wayfinding, Themed Environment and Industrial specialties. All of these people work in the design and execution of the physical world; spaces, places and objects that shape everything we see and feel when we experience environments.

This is an example of a system that allows for a virtually infinite amount of visual data to be explored in some very unique ways. Watch this video and think about it for a few minutes. This is really cool stuff (even if it is from Microsoft!)